RICK Harrison, the un likely star of this year’s most unpredictable TV hit, “Pawn Stars,” had to fight his way into the business that has now made him famous.

Over the years, his family has tried its hand at everything from a sandwich shop to a string of payday-loan stores — waging battles with competitors and the city of Las Vegas all along the way, Las Vegas city records show.

“Rick is certainly a very hard worker and a visionary,” said Las Vegas resident Ed Koch, a longtime customer of the Harrisons’ Gold & Silver Pawn shop and a customer of their payday-loan store before that.

“But you have to remember he doesn’t do anything unless he can do it to make a buck. This is what drives him.”

Tomorrow night, Harrison will be the center of attention at Caesars Palace, the flagship hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, just a few miles south of the seedy location of Gold & Silver Pawn — now one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

Rick has been named “Pawnbroker of the Year” by the National Pawnbrokers Assn., and the whole cast and crew of the show will be there for his big night.

It may not be an Oscar — but in the world Harrison comes from, it’s the next-best thing.

The road to “Pawn Stars” began 20 years ago, when Richard Benjamin Harrison, Rick’s now-68-year-old father, filed a lawsuit against the city of Las Vegas for a license to convert his second-hand store into a pawn shop.

The city severely limited the number of pawnbroker licenses it issued back then. The formula was based on the population of Vegas and, the city argued, there were already enough.

After a year-long court battle, a judge ordered the Harrisons be granted a license.

“I supported them [the Harrisons] at the time. I knew them very well. I helped put them in business,” said Ermenia Drobkin, owner of Pioneer Pawn, one of the oldest pawn shops in Vegas. “I’m glad I helped them.”

But not all of Rick’s business decisions have been as Midas-like.

Ten years ago, for instance, Harrison started Golden Loans, an “installment loan” business, at three separate locations in Las Vegas.

Installment loans — or payday loans, as they’re commonly called — are a fiercely competitive and lightly regulated business that thrives in Las Vegas by offering short-term loans at very high interest rates.

Less than two years after Golden Loans opened, Your Credit Incorporated (YCI), an Oklahoma corporation that owned several competing stores in Las Vegas, sued Harrison, charging he’d lured away several former YCI employees — and that the employees had divulged trade secrets to him.

The suit alleged that the employees even helped Harrison tap into the YCI computer system to get customer lists.

The suit — filed by one of the biggest and most politically connected law firms in Vegas — was too much for Harrison to fight. He quit the installment-loan business shortly after the suit was filed and went back to the pawn shop business.

“I don’t care what the big corporation alleged in the suit, Rick was offering loans at a better rate than his competitor,” Koch said. “And he was killing them.

Then, after spending a few years helping his father build the business at Gold & Silver, Rick cast his eye on another opportunity, fast food.

To capitalize on the heavy foot traffic in the down-and-out area around Gold & Silver Pawn, a neighborhood of porn stores and pawn shops along Las Vegas Boulevard, he started a sandwich shop a few blocks away.

Turns out people in the neighborhood were more interested in other things, and the sandwich place was abandoned after a few years.

“I know how Rick is portrayed in the show — and TV is nice,” Koch says. “But Rick is first and foremost a businessman. He moves things for a profit. This is what he’s all about.”

Some tourists who traveled thousands of miles to visit Gold & Silver Pawn would agree.

“I loved the store,” Dawn, a visitor from Houston, said after making a pilgrimage to Gold & Silver Pawn a little while ago.

“The death clocks were fascinating and all the stuff is great,” she says.